Don't Let Go Read Free Page A

helps them regain muscle and get their balance back.”
    “I had no idea,” he admitted, intrigued. He eyed her belly inquiringly.
    “You caught me mucking out the stall,” she apologized, ignoring the look. “Come into the office,” she suggested. “I have so much to tell you.”
    Ten minutes later, with the promise that the FBI would do everything in their powers to help locate her sister, Jillian watched Rafael leave.
    With graceful ease, he slipped into the Cutlass and donned his seat belt. She had never seen him dressed in anything but pajamas, yet it came as no surprise that he wore a designer silk suit of unrelenting gray, a snowy white shirt, and no tie. Even in pajamas there had been something elegant about him.
    As he smiled at her, a lightness buoyed her heavy heart, easing the crush that kept her so despondent. How nice to have seen him again, a friend she’d cherished for a short time and then lost, especially since she’d lost so much lately.
    With a deft hand on the steering wheel, he backed up and pulled away, and her sorrow returned.
    She hadn’t even told him she was widowed. Every morning she awakened to the panicky realization that her family’s welfare rested on her narrow shoulders. Her baby, Gary’s surprise legacy, would be born in two short months, and she had so much left to do before she could give their baby the attention it deserved.
    With a weary sigh, Jillian turned to gaze at the barn. She must’ve been crazy to think she could honor her and Gary’s dream alone. But now that she’d started, she had no choice but see it through.

Las Amazonas, Venezuela
    “What’s the plan, Senior Chief?” whispered Petty Officer Vinny DeInnocentis as he slapped at a mosquito boring through the camo paint slathered on his neck. With night falling, the insects were swarming worse than ever.
    Solomon McGuire, aka Mako, took his eyes off the rebel-occupied Misión de la Paz long enough to send Vinny a glacial stare. Given the pale, almost colorless gray of his eyes, glacial stares required little effort on his part.
    “What?” the kid demanded with inner-city bravado. “We’ve been lyin’ here for like six hours, watching these jackasses scare the locals. When’re we gonna pursue the objective?”
    “We haven’t been lying here,” Solomon corrected him. “We’ve been observing.”
    “True,” Vinny acknowledged, giving Solomon brief hope that he might one day make chief, but then he added, “and I have observed that a big-ass beetle is climbing up my right leg heading straight to my balls. There’s a venomous snake dangling five meters over our heads, and the vines that we’re hiding in look a lot like poison oak.”
    “It’s trumpet flower,” Solomon retorted, nonetheless attuned to Vinny’s restlessness. “We’re going to penetrate at zero one hundred hours. You, Teddy, and Gus will sweep the enclosure while I locate the recovery targets. We find them, flexicuff them, and get them out. Harley and Haiku will meet up with us at the rendezvous point.”
    Vinny’s white teeth flashed in the gloom. “Hooyah, Senior Chief. I gotta get this bug outta my pants,” he added, shaking his leg in what looked like a rendition of the hokey pokey as he backed out of the vines.
    Solomon thumbed his interteam radio to contact the sniper team. “Four hours to Operation Extraction,” he warned the spotter and shooter.
    “Roger,” Harley murmured back. Now that darkness was falling, he and Haiku were making their way along the top of the mission wall, over a ceramic-tiled roof of the outdoor kitchen, up and into the bell tower of the seventeenth-century chapel, an ideal vantage point from which to guard the recovery team’s blazing entrance and subsequent search.
    Solomon set his watch to perform a countdown.

Chapter Two
    Three hours and fifty minutes later, Solomon watched the seconds tick down on the face of his MTM Extreme Ops Black SEAL watch. He and his recovery team were poised